Digital television from Romtelecom available only in Romania for 5 EUR/month (3.9 EUR/month for Romtelecom customers). The service was launched today (you can read more here).
Archive for November, 2006
Wine Spectator is the no. 1 magazine dedicated to wines all over the world. In 2006, they reviewed nearly 13,500 wines from around the world in blind tastings. Nearly 3,000 of them earned outstanding ratings (90 points or higher on our 100-point scale).
The Wine of the Year is Casanova di Neri – Brunello di Montalcino, Tenuta Nuova 2001 produced in Tuscany.
The wine received 97 points and its price is around $70 – there are only 4,830 cases made so I guess this is a good idea for a gift this Christmas.
Same topic on other blogs: Cezar, Andrei and Sebi Buhai.
Check out the official page also – click here…
For the first time in Romania we managed to set up a wine tasting “en primeur”. Cezar was the mastermind behind this and Sergiu Nedelea was the host at Casa Iancului. The event was a success and for the first time we had the chance to bring together (as live persons) some of the users on vinul.ro – we believe the website is a success and has a great power to target its niche. The project was launched with the new look at the beginning of this year and till now we reached over 100.000 wine lovers.
This was the first BTL event for vinul.ro and I hope you’ll see more in 2007. Vali (ZIUA) also writes about the event on his blog – check it out here.
Orlando Nicoara (ex. Netbridge manager) will face the next months a series of attacks and pressures from the NCH Group. The investors had trouble recovering after Orlando left the business this summer – one of the most important issues pointed internally was the fact that the board had no clue about what was going on, as Nicoara was a “one man army”.
Since July, NCH changed their policy and tried to figure out what went wrong. There is a team tracking Orlando’s management and they are committed to use all the methods to get even. The battle will take place on several levels:
- NCH plans to sue Nicoara for bad management;
- there will be a mass-media campaign in order to discredit him (from bad practices to money laundry);
- they will pressure MediaPro in order to fire Orlando;
Some of the things they intend to do are not suitable for the Romanian environment. Attacking Orlando’s credibility can affect the whole industry, not only Media Pro Interactiv. On the other hand, this is a thing “they have to do” and I’m sure they’ll use all the available legal methods.
JOBfest ENO – National Online Event – this is the new product we launched today, after the classical JOBfest fair that took place last week. The event will end on the 21st of January 2007 and during this time we’ll try to provide interviews, articles and online counseling for the young professionals.
As we speak, 50 companies recruit via JOBfest ENO. I’ve also seen the first in-house statistics and it seems that the most wanted employers are ORACLE, BRD-GSG, ACCENTURE and HP.
Via Andrei Badin, an exclusive post about a book written by the ex. romanian foreign intelligence general, Ion Mihai Pacepa about the soviet espionage at the height of the Cold War – the book is about the assasination of the US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a KGB operation.
Probably really is interesting reading as general Pacepa had the chance to study the “Mitrokhin Archive”. I hope we’ll see the movie quite soon.
Very busy week as I had to take care of the PR for JOBfest. It was not easy – we identified a negative campaign started from another area and we had to counterbalance the effects. I’m sure that the company who started this will not get the award for “best practice” and in some countries what they did is considered illegal (I’m happy Romanian will join the EU in january).
So… this week was about press releases, interviews and smiling (the smiling was the easiest part as I’m a happy face most of the time). On Monday we had Evenimentul Zilei writing about us (thanks to Felicia Niculae – she really did a very good coverage during the week also, as she is doing a very good job with the “Career section” in the newspaper). I also noticed that “Adevarul” reported every time we had something to say.
Monday and Tuesday meant also two press releases and on Wednesday morning we had a very good radio coverage: KISS FM (who was also the official partner), Radio21 (interview and news), Radio Romania, Radio Bucharest, BBC (very good coverage), MIX FM & Student Fm. I also got a report that we made the news on Infopro, RadioTOTAL, NationalFM and probably many small stations.
Now, probably the most important for the companies we had there, was the TV coverage. First day we had only National TV but on Thursday we were visited by TVR (the Romanian National Television)/ TVRi, PROTV and Antena1. Also, a SensoTV team was there for a larger report (they also had a workshop during the event). On Friday we had PrimaTV and I hope I mentioned everyone. Very happy about the TV coverage was the Hewlett-Packard team – they plan to hire more than 400 specialists next year, so they had something to say. Also ACCENTURE, ORACLE, DACIA, BUTANGAS, LYNGSOE SYSTEMS, GAMELOFT and BRD had PR people talking on TV.
The printed press coverage was quite ok (long list of publications, i’ll get the monitoring report next week) and besides the news articles, I have to tanks our partners at Business Adviser, Business Point, PC World, COMPUTERWORLD, NETWORKWORLD, Ziua, Gazeta, SCJ, StudentMax and AutoExpert.
Very special thanks to Ciprian Macesaru at SAPTE SERI – for the second time partners at JOBfest.
Last but not least, we had the Internet. I belive that many people had no trouble to find us online – UTV helped us (U online – thanks Victor) but also BestJOBS (thanks to Calin Fusu for the workshop and to Marian Pop for the online help). I won’t forget Cristi Lucan (academiadeafaceri.ro was a good partner), Cezar Ioan, Andrei Crivat, Victor Glijin (RegieLive.ro), Adrian Baston (very operative), Toni Budici, Mihai Cana, Mihaela Hartescu (great job at ASPSE) and Gheorghe Bucluc (OSE).
If you received any message from JOBfest this week, it means I did my job. If not, you probably weren’t on the target. 
Cezar posted a very interesting initiative started by Delice: a proposal to boycott the OMV Petrom gas stations as they increased the prices on fuel. Interesting idea, let’s see how is it going to get out of the box and hit the masses.
Via Andrei Crivat (he has a new blog url), here is a virtual lesson of creative consulting…
Via Orlando, Carpa Enterprises Limited (NCH Advisors) involved in a scandal with romanian web domain names (tv stars) – the article in Jurnalul National – Vlad Stan has no comments yet.
Calin Fusu (Neogen manager) was today at JOBfest and presented the BestJobs service in a special event. I met him a few moments before the workshop and had a chat.
The first thing I asked him was about blogging and he told me why he doesn’t blog. He also told me that he has some employees that blog and sometimes it seems that they are Neogen officials – he was worried about this as he already told his employees not to comment official business on blogs – but there are over 70 members in his team so it’s not so easy.
On the other hand he told me that this year they made the first million (only with BestJobs) and the year is not over yet – so Calin is very optimistic about BestJobs and all their projects. He also estimates a 3 million $ online-recruiting market in 2007.
I met a friend who has access to the Internet traffic in the Regie campus (the largest student campus in Bucharest and a small IT city). They get out with only 27 IP addresses but there are more than 32.000 students taking classes in Politehnica University (near to the campus) or living in Regie.
I was more than amazed to find out that over 50% of the web traffic hits local sports newspaper – gsp.ro. No. 2 in their preferences is porn (nothing new here). Another interesting fact is that the voice-over-ip services seem to be a new trend and they cause heavy traffic also.
Of course, the news of the day was about gsp.ro as many of the students have it as a homepage.
The event took place a few days ago. A big surprise was in the wine industry where the Golden Award for Excellence was awarded to Gheorghe Moisescu for the “Davino” Wines – the “Ultimate-High-End” campaign. Few people know that Moisescu is a freelancer and the campaign was very cost effective. The Silver Award went to NEXTCAP and their PR for the “Murfatlar” wines.
One year ago, Moisescu was at a meeting with all the marketing managers from the wine industry. I was also there because the meeting was about an event I was directing. At some time, Moisescu invited all the managers to do some serious PR campaigns for their companies in order to increase the market. All the managers ignored him (and you could see it on their faces – because they had the big agencies working for them) except Dan Balaban – the “Davino” owner – you can see now who’s laughing 
The jury: Tony Meeahan,Thomas Achelis, Adriana Saftoiu, Dumitru Bortun, Gilda Lazar, Lidia Solomon, Mircea Vasilescu, Nelly Benova, Adrian Vasilescu, Cristina Guseth, Anca Harasim, Calin Sabac.
Congratulations!
Today was probably the worse day of the year (till now). I had to explain basic marketing, blogging and viral advertising to people that had nothing to do with this field – smart people, corporate mentality but no idea about what was all about. My day became more intense as a multinational corporate manager told me that they need their Romanian employees to work, not to think. He also stated that they don’t encourage blogging – probably they see this virtual movement as a threat to their internal peace and corporate regulations. One thing he didn’t know was that I can easily reach his regional European boss – a guy who is far more open-minded.
This is the third time this year I try to solve my problems with the regional bureau because the local management has a limited decision power and also a limited vision. I hate to do this but the only way they move the things around is when they get the “LET’S DO THIS” e-mail from the big boss.
So, if you work in a multinational in Romania, try not to blog because your job is at risk (unless you already are with the highest rank). One thing is for sure: blogging is dangerous because you waste company time and can accidentally give away corporate secrets of your everyday life.
Because in a week from now, JOBfest will open the gates for the visitors, we try to put everything in place. One last goal is to have among the top recruiting companies (ORACLE, HP, DACIA, DELOITTE or MICHELIN) an institution that is also targeting young people: the Romanian Army. As JOBfest takes place at the Army Palace, downtown Bucharest I believe that the presence of the army recruiters will reconfirm the need for highly trained professionals in the area and how to meet them if not in this type of career event.
Having competitive human resources as an army means recruiting from the top minds and JOBfest is the right place to be this time of year. I think that we did our homework and hope JOBfest will reach the core target.
Latest news via JOBfest blog: Calin Fusu will host a workshop on the 16th of November on how to recruit online and how to do recruiting business online. I’ll be there because I want to ask him if BestJobs made the million $$$ this year…
This morning I came across a VERY strange IE bug on one of my websites that we have to launch tomorrow – a certain page would not work in IE5, IE6, IE7 under Windows XP SP1, SP2, while it worked fine in Firefox, Opera or Mozilla.
The message shown is: Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site [url...] Operation aborted !!!
Apparently interacting with innerHTML and possibly using other JScript functionality causes IE to pop up “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site. This bug appears when you try to put some html inside a DIV tag using innerHTML and solved the problem by puting the DIV inside a TABLE. Sample code for “Operation aborted”
This sample code will give you the “Operation aborted” error in IE6, while it works as expected in Firefox:
So, the bug appeared on the website when we put the ARBO codes. As you know, the ARBO codes come with two parts. It seemed that the second part caused the bug when was placed just below the last code in a table.
ARBO says:
<-- HowTo: It is good idea to place this code just below the last ad code. -->
and I would ad:
<-- HowTo: It is not a good idea to place this code just below the last ad code if the ad is in a table and if your users use Internet Explorer -->
The solution: because the site used a template, we took the second part of the code and put it in the footer file… far, far below the last ad code and it seems that and out of any table. So if this would happen to you, blame Microsoft and put the codes outside any table.
Via Channel9 MSDN Wiki:
It seems that this problem is caused by the fact that the SCRIPT block operating on innerHTML or DOM structures is located inside a TABLE tag. I moved the SCRIPT tags outside the TABLE tag, and viola – that fixed the problem. Peter Janes pointed out in the comments that the issue is deeper than that, it seems to be related to the timing issues with DOM rendering. I am going to leave it for now unless I see other problems, but using setTimeout or some other way of doing things is not out of the question.
More about the IE bug issue on Peter Janes.
Via Orlando and Sorin, I see that the new version of Acasa.ro is now online. They also did a little rebranding but the fuzz is over nothing.
Let me remind you that if you want an e-mail account, you still receive a 5MB mailbox (hilarious) and as Vlad Stan is aiming to take out Kappa and become no.2 after Neogen, there is more and more porn on the website – this is an issue even inside Netbridge as there are voices trying to convince Stan to keep it low with the porn as they try to build a strong community of educational websites.
So, Acasa.ro is just a new logo on the old website and probably more porn for the average Joe.
Very below the line… the teaser was on the net targeted on me and some folks – the leaderboards on my websites followed me through the day (Aproape de televiziune).
The next thing, was an envelope. Inside: a picture, a place and an hour.
So what was the fuzz about? There were 2 theories. First, people thought that ARBO managed to secretly renegotiate the contract with the Romanian Television. I thought it was interesting but after a phone call, a friend told me that is a rumor he also heard and was not true.
The second theory was when we discovered the picture in the envelope so we imagined that was the new ARBO headquarters and it was the grand opening.
The naked truth?
Well, it was the new headquarters but still under construction (and near the Romanian Television). They managed to give us the outfit for protection and we visited the building. Overall, the BTL event was inspired and everybody had tons of fun. Of course that after the visit, we had a hot drink and chat at a near café.
I think the event was a hit and today I managed to send a “thank you” note.
